Holtz Center member, Thomas Popkewitz, along with Daniel Pettersson and Kai-Jun Hsiao, recently edited the newly published, “The International Emergence of Educational Sciences in the Post-World War Two Years: Quantification, Visualization, and Making Kinds of People”
This book brings together contributions from curriculum history, cultural studies, visual cultures, and science and technology studies to explore the international mobilizations of the sciences related to education during the post–World War Two years. Crossing the boundaries of education and science studies, it uniquely examines how the desires of science to actualize a better society were converted to the search for remaking social life that paradoxically embodied cultural differences and social divisions.
The book examines how cybernetics and systems theories traveled and were assembled to turn schools into social experiments and laboratories for change. Explored are the new comparative technologies of quantification and the visualization of educational data used in the methods of mass observation. The sciences not only about the present but also the potentialities of societies and people in the psychologies of childhood; concerns for individual development, growth, and creativity; teacher education; and the quantification and assessments of educational systems. The book also explores how the categories and classifications of the sciences formed at intersections with the humanities, the arts, and political practices.
For more information, visit: http://www.routledge.com/9780367182793
Popkewitz is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the School of Education.